Brooklyn Man Fatally Shot by Police Was Unarmed, Bratton Says
Source: New York Times
A rookie New York City police officer shot and killed an unarmed 28-year-old man in a darkened stairwell in Brooklyn late Thursday night, according to the police.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said the shooting appeared to be unprovoked.
“We don’t know enough yet, but it does appear to be an accident,” the mayor said at a news conference on Friday. “This is a tragedy.”
Read more: www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/nyregion/new-york-police-officer-fatally-shoots-brooklyn-man.html
If you read the whole story, it sounds like the police were patrolling in one of the projects, the Louis H. Pink Houses, and the stairwells they were in had no lights, were dark. So the first thing they did was pull out their flashlights... and the one cop had his gun drawn. Why a gun? No reports of anything wrong, just on patrol. But bad neighborhood, so gun drawn. Dark hall, scared policeman, innocent person walking down the stairs, now a dead innocent person walking down the stairs. Accident.
I say no accident, but a victim of the current system of our police departments all across this country, that has cops afraid of the population they are supposedly protecting, looking at them as the enemy, shooting first and asking questions later.
Is there really any way we can get control of this insanity???
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Accident, my arse! Is de Blasio afraid of his PD? How can he say it was an "accident?" Why could he have not said it was a tragedy and been done with it? 
And that the police officer was a rookie should tell us that this is exactly the way they are training police recruits today: shoot and ask questions later.
Police training across this land must change: from military policing to civilian policing.
Many Americans are utterly consumed by fear. Fear short-circuits rational thinking, turning control over to more primitive parts of your brain. In truly dangerous situations, there's a good evolutionary reason for this. It ensures your survival and the survival of your DNA. But when you are constantly bombarded by stimuli that trigger the threat response, the amygdala, a region of the brain that plays a principal role in orchestrating this response, becomes over-reactive. Suddenly, things that didn't use to bother you before are more likely to make you jump and react as though confronting a threat. This is colloquially known as an amygdala attack. Needless to say, this is extremely dangerous when it occurs in someone who is armed.
There's another alarming aspect to this growing over-reaction to perceived threats. It not only makes your amygdala hypersensitive, but it also physically shrinks another region of your brain, the hippocampus, which handles key aspects of learning and memory.
So if you were wondering why the country seems to be awash with fearful, stupid people, with very little sense of context and proportion, now you know.
